P. C. Wren - The Collected Works of P. C. Wren - Complete Beau Geste Series, Novels & Short Stories

Attached to this letter was a sheet of notepaper on which was written that which, later, gave me furiously to think, and at the time, saddened and depressed me. I wondered if it were intended as a warning and " pour encourager les autres ," for it was not like my uncle to write me mere Service news.

" By the way, I have broken Captain de Lannec, as I promised him (and you too) that I would do to anyone who, in any way, failed me. . . . A woman, of course. . . . He had my most strict and stringent orders to go absolutely straight and instantly to Mulai Idris, the Holy City, and establish himself there, relieving Captain St. André, with whom it was vitally important that I should have a personal interview within the month. " Passing through the Zarhoun, de Lannec got word from one of our friendlies that a missing Frenchwoman was in a village among the mountains. She was the amie of a French officer, and had been carried off during the last massacre, and was in the hareem of the big man of the place. . . . It seems de Lannec had known her in Paris. . . . One Véronique Vaux. . . . Loved her, perhaps. . . . He turned aside from his duty; he wasted a week in getting the woman; another in placing her in safety; and then was so good as to attend to the affairs of his General, his Service and his Country! . . . " Exit de Lannec. . . . "

Serve him right, of course! . . . Yes--of course. . . .

A little hard? . . . Very, very sad--for he was a most promising officer, a tiger in battle, and a fox on Secret Service; no braver, cleverer, finer fellow in the French Army. . . . But yes, it served him right, certainly. . . . He had acted very wrongly--putting personal feelings and the fate of a woman before the welfare of France, before the orders of his Commander, before the selfless, self-effacing tradition of the Service. . . . Before his God --Duty, in short.

He deserved his punishment. . . . Yes. . . . He had actually put a mere woman before Duty . . . . " Exit de Lannec. " . . . Serve him right, poor devil. . . .

And then the Imp that dwells at the Back of my Mind said to the Angel that dwells at the Front of my Mind:

" Suppose the captured woman, dwelling in that unthinkable slavery of pollution and torture, had been that beautiful, queenly and adored lady, the noble wife of the stern General Bertrand de Beaujolais himself? "

Silence, vile Imp! No one comes before Duty.

Duty is a Jealous God. . . .

* * *

I was to think more about de Lannec ere long.

§ 2

I confess to beginning with a distinct dislike for the extremely beautiful Miss Vanbrugh, when I met her at dinner, at Colonel Levasseur's, with her brother. Her brother, by the way, was an honorary ornament of the American Embassy at Paris, and was spending his leave with his adventurous sister and her maid-companion in "doing" Algeria, and seeing something of the desert. The Colonel had rather foolishly consented to their coming to Zaguig "to see something of the real desert and of Empire in the making," as Otis Hankinson Vanbrugh had written to him.

I rather fancy that the beaux yeux of Miss Mary, whom Colonel Levasseur had met in Paris and at Mustapha Supérieur, had more to do with it than a desire to return the Paris hospitality of her brother.

Anyhow, a young girl had no business to be there at that time. . . .

Probably my initial lack of liking for Mary Vanbrugh was prompted by her curious attitude towards myself, and my utter inability to fathom and understand her. The said attitude was one of faintly mocking mild amusement, and I have not been accustomed to regarding myself as an unintentionally amusing person. In fact, I have generally found people rather chary of laughing at me.

But not so Mary Vanbrugh. And for some obscure reason she affected to suppose that my name was " Ivan ." Even at dinner that first evening, when she sat on Levasseur's right and my left, she addressed me as " Major Ivan ."

To my stiff query, "Why Ivan , Miss Vanbrugh?" her half-suppressed provoking smile would dimple her very beautiful cheeks as she replied:

"But surely? . . . You are really Ivan What's-his-name in disguise, aren't you? . . . Colonel Levasseur told me you are a most distinguished Intelligence Officer on Secret Service, and I think that must be one of the Secrets. . . ."

I was puzzled and piqued. Certainly I have played many parts in the course of an adventurous career, but my duties have never brought me in contact with Russians, nor have I ever adopted a Russian disguise and name. Who was this " Ivan What's-his-name "? . . . However, if the joke amused her . . . and I shrugged my shoulders.

"Oh, do do that again, Major Ivan," she said. "It was so delightfully French and expressive. You dear people can talk with your shoulders and eyebrows as eloquently as we barbarous Americans can with our tongues."

"Yes--we are amusing little funny foreigners, Mademoiselle," I observed. "And if, as Ivan What's-his-name, I have made you smile, I have not lived wholly in vain. . . ."

"No. You have not, Major Ivan," she agreed. A cooler, calmer creature I have never encountered. . . . A man might murder her, but he would never fluster nor discompose her serenity while she lived.

Level-eyed, slow-spoken, unhurried, she was something new and strange to me, and she intrigued me in spite of myself.

Before that evening finished and I had to leave that wide moonlit verandah, her low rich voice, extreme self-possession, poise, grace, and perfection almost conquered my dislike of her, in spite of her annoying air of ironic mockery, her mildly contemptuous amusement at me, my sayings and my doings.

As I made my way back to my quarters by the Bab-el-Souq, I found myself saying, "Who the devil is this Ivan What's-his-name ?" and trying to re-capture an air that she had hummed once or twice as I sat coldly silent after some piece of slightly mocking irony. How did it go?

Yes, that was it.

§ 3

Miss Vanbrugh's curiosity and interest in native life were insatiable. She was a living interrogation-mark, and to me she turned, on the advice of the over-worked Levasseur, for information--as it was supposed that what I did not know about the Arab, in all his moods and tenses, was not worth knowing.

I was able to bring that sparkling dancing flash of pleasure to her eyes, that seemed literally to light them up, although already as bright as stars, by promising to take her to dinner with my old friend Sidi Ibrahim Maghruf.

At his house she would have a real Arab dinner in real Arab fashion, be able to see exactly how a wealthy native lived, and to penetrate into the innermost arcana of a real hareem .

* * *

I had absolute faith in old Ibrahim Maghruf, and I had known him for many years and in many places.

Not only was he patently and provenly honest and reliable in himself--but his son and heir was in France, and much of his money in French banks and companies. He was a most lovable old chap, and most interesting too--but still he was a native , when all is said, and his heart was Arab.

It was difficult to realize, seeing him seated cross-legged upon his cushions and rugs in the marble-tiled French-Oriental reception-room of his luxurious villa, that he was a self-made man who had led his caravans from Siwa to Timbuctu, from Wadai to Algiers, and had fought in a hundred fights for his property and life against the Tebu, Zouaia, Chambaa, Bedouin, and Touareg robbers of the desert. He had indeed fulfilled the Arab saying, " A man should not sleep on silk until he has walked on sand. "